domestic violence

I’m writing this using Internet Explorer as blogger seems to work fine with it, and the issue they are having at the moment happens only in Firefox. Apparently. Well let’s hope they get it fixed soon because using IE makes me want to mutilate squirrels. And I like squirrels a lot. So I guess it’s lucky I’m in Australia where we don’t have any.

I’m really glad to see Meva is back to blogging, she vanished for a short time. This means I am finally going to post something I’ve been thinking about posting for a while now. I’m hoping that people aren’t just going to run away and stop reading this blog if I admit this. It’s not exactly cheerful reading, and this is not a trip down memory lane that I am looking forward to, but I think it has to be done.

Some years ago, I was very depressed. So much so that I could not get out of bed, most of the time. It all started when my car got broken into. I had worked for a company that sold car sound, and I had installed $7,000 worth of car audio into my car – myself.

It had a great alarm, and the people who broke into it laid under the car for over an hour with a rag stuffed into the siren while the backup battery ran down. I was furious. I wanted to kill the people who did it, but I didn’t know who they were. I was so angry, I can’t even describe it.

They were helped by the fact that my husband (yes I was married) had chosen for us to live in a house with a driveway from hell that I could not drive my car up or down, it had brick walls on both side, and it was at approximately a 45 degree angle.

Some months before he had decided to buy it – without consulting me. He told me we were buying it. I wanted to look at other houses, he refused to consider it. The house belonged to his Dad, and his Dad wanted to get rid of it. I suppose that was when I realised that I’d made a huge mistake, and this marriage thing was not the best of ideas.

So then one night soon after the car break in I went to fill up the ice cube tray, and the tap fell off the wall into my hand. Water was gushing out of the wall, I was absolutely saturated. Husband ran in and was screaming at me to go and turn off the water, I had no idea how to do that, so I said he would have to do it. He goes out, turns it off, returns, and by this time I am laughing – well, you have to, right? :)

I was completely soaking wet, and he was furious – that I was laughing, that the tap fell off the wall, and he starts yelling at me. I said “I’m not the one who decided to buy this house” and out of nowhere he just slapped me. I grabbed my car keys and left, not even stopping to get shoes. I did not go back.

That was my first run in with the black hole of depression, it certainly was not my last. There was a time in the early 2000’s when I spent over a year in there.. Everyone who has been there has a different way of describing it. To me it was like a big black hole I’d fallen into and I had no idea how to get out.

I might sometimes seem like I’m functioning well and everything is fine, but I know I am always close to the edge of that dark hole, and if I don’t work hard to keep myself out of it, I can end up back there. Seeing as it’s so hard to get out, I’ve worked out strategies over time which help me keep out of there. I’m going to share some of those with you guys over the next few weeks because I recognise they may be helpful to other people, too.

Normal people who have never been depressed will not understand the effort required to do just simple every day tasks when you’re down. Just to get up out of bed and have a shower seems like something impossible. The effort involved, to me it always seemed like someone had tied weights to my arms and legs, and it was difficult to move them. Probably most people who have been down will understand that.

So don’t think this post is looking for sympathy or anything like that, I’m not. Right now I feel like I’m flying. Things are going pretty well, except for the fact I have no job and no desire to get one, but it’s ok, we’re coping, I don’t really need to get one until I feel like it.

I just want people to know that I’ve been there, too.

I think most people end up there sometime. It’s ok to admit it, and it’s ok to ask for help – and get help. There’s plenty of it out there, if you look in the right places. :)